Playing trombone was always easy – until it wasn’t. I started at age 10 in fifth grade, and by sixth grade I got a superior rating at solo/ensemble contest. Onward and upward, until finally bad habits I didn’t know I had caught up with me. I discovered Body Mapping through an accident of fate and good luck.
My journey through learning Body Mapping has been enlightening, to say the least. Learning how to breathe, sit and stand and hold my head correctly has been an adventure. My teacher has been terrific, knowledgeable and patient, and I’ve had additional help along the way. This has led to self-exploration, of course, and the most important discoveries recently have been related to my head and neck. Years of marching bands and military training had taught me to stand/sit “at attention,” head/chin up, shoulders back. Over time, this posture negatively affected my breathing/blowing and tongue movement. This led to the discovery that what I’ve always thought was the center of my aperture wasn’t; through an accidental encounter when I was discussing it with a friend, I found that to get my air to go through the middle – the center of my lips, where they open fully and most naturally when I blow air between them – I have to move my jaw slightly to the right. Then and only then, do I get a perfectly round, efficient aperture. And then things start to work: my sound and accuracy and flexibility improve, and my tonguing frees up (as long as I don’t tilt my head back like I habitually did before). This also sheds light on why the muscles on the right aways seemed weak, leading to an occasional air pocket in my cheek; once I make that adjustment, the right side falls into line and my embouchure is balanced (probably for the first time ever!). It’s an ongoing process, developing new habits to replace the old, but it’s working. Curiously, in brass quintet rehearsal, my trumpeter friend suggested that that setting might be why I have a somewhat extraordinary high range, and he asked me to slur from low to high while he watched. Sure enough, he could see my chin moving to the right as I ascended. So my job now is to train the middle and low registers to be comfortable with this “new” setting.
Source material:
What Every Musician Needs To Know About The Body by Barbara Conable
What Every Trombonist Needs To Know About The Body by David Vining
The Breathing Book (for various instruments) by David Vining
